“We’re not a band, we’re a company” or, The Evri Ontology Explained
The quote in the title is from an (in)famous 1980 interview with John Lydon (Rotten) and Keith Levene of the group Public Image Limited. They spent a good portion of the time saying, “We’re not a band, we’re a company” to an obviously perplexed host, Tom Snyder.
Other than appealing to post-punk fanboys, why I am talking about this? Well, the PiL boys are raising a point near and dear to our hearts — what is the difference between a “band” and a “company”? And, how do you tell the difference programmatically? This is important because we use software to ‘read” web content, extract all of the named entities and then try to categorize them against our standard ontology. We refer to the individual things (Barack Obama, James Bond, and Paris, France) and subjects (Grammy Awards, World War II, and USA Patriot Act) of the world our users would want to know more about or understand the connections between as ‘entities.’
At Evri, we use six ontology types - People, Locations, Organizations, Products, Events, and Concepts (the last four are grouped as Things on our homepage.) These are intentionally broad — they are intended to be the most immutable part of our description of things — once a person, always a person. We have a couple of other ‘root’ level types - Temporal and Numeric - that are used, and are useful when analyzing content and making recommendations, but not shown directly in the User Interface. These are not fixed for all time — as the scope of our entity coverage grows we have built things in a way to make is easy to add more basic types.
For the more dynamic description of an entity’s characteristics or role, we use the term facet. Each entity can be of only one basic type, but can have many facets. A location is only a Location, but it can have multiple facets (State Capital and County Seat, for example.) The dynamic and extensible nature of facets let’s us rapidly respond to emerging descriptions in the web content our systems analyze. You can think of facets as a kind of tagging.
We show the current facet(s) of an entity at the top of each profile page. You can see this in the screenshot of the top of Bono’s Evri Profile, that his facet’s are ‘Musician’ and ‘Activist.’
We use facets in many ways. First, to provide information to the user — so that you know more about the person, place or thing you are looking at. But, it’s not just for display. We use this information to help with our document analysis systems. Facet information helps with entity disambiguation, for example. It’s very important for us to have the highest degree of precision identifying which particular ‘Michael Jackson” is referred to in content on the web. Unlike keyword search, being correct here is crucial to what we are building.
Facets also help with making recommendations. Our systems, and our curators, learn what kinds of activities and relationships occur most often for particular facets. We can then use this information to create templates to highlight these actions and relationships in our user interface. For example, ‘Musician’ facets are often “performing” so we make sure that we highlight this action, if it exists, on a musician’s profile page.
Lastly for now, I would mention that once we figure out our browse UI, an important way to explore our Evri profiles will be by pivoting on these facets.
We will have future posts from the team that works on these systems as soon as they finish them 